Reliable evaluation of the structure and function of aspects of organs from images is of importance in clinical examination and diagnosis of most disorders, for example, cardiac disorders. However, automatic segmentation of some organs that have irregular geometry, such as the right ventricle (RV) of a heart, can be difficult. For example, the right ventricle has a highly variable, crescent shape, and thin and ill-defined borders. Thus, methods that have been applied to segment left ventricle (LV) images cannot be directly applied to segment right ventricle (RV) on echocardiography because of: (i) poor imaging quality for RV and (ii) irregular geometry of the RV.
Despite the importance of its structure evaluations for clinical diagnosis, images of these organs, such as of the RV, are often segmented manually by experts. This can be time consuming because hundreds of images in one image series need to be segmented and also because the irregular shape can make the segmentation difficult.